A day that may yet live in Infamy.  (Or maybe not...) 

At any rate, that was the day I saw it, sitting on the racks of a comic book shop.  The second issue of Scan, a magazine apparently intended for makers of vampire girl and slasher videos on a low, low, budget. 

Actually, vampire girl and slasher videos held no particular interest for me.  But I also noticed useful articles on the nuts and bolts of micro-budget productions, including a particularly good one on do-it-yourself dialog looping.  And then, on page 20, I found it. 

"Digital Video: The New Wave". 

It was a piece on the new phenomenon of DV (Digital Video) - about cameras costing a few thousand dollars that could rival professional gear worth tens of thousands.  Better yet, one could get a card, for another thousand or so, that would permit the resulting footage to be edited on a desktop computer. 

Perhaps you, too, can hear the little pop of the flashbulb going off over my head going off just then... 

But the trouble was that I kept seeing things.  I guess that would be the best way of putting it.  Things that I saw up on the screen; things that I had to get there, somehow or other. 

So now I knew what I was going to do.  I was going to get those things up on the screen myself. 
  
March 6, 1998 

Before that fateful day in December, making my own movies was an idea I had never entertained seriously.  This in spite of the little 8mm projects I made while in high school, and my more recent ambition of becoming a screenwriter.  Somehow the concept was so outlandish, so utterly unlikely, that it never even occurred to me. 

But once planted,  the new idea began sending out shoots in every direction.  I immediately started writing a screenplay based on my unsold novel - perhaps the form I had always really wanted it in, anyway.  I also commenced an accelerated program on the technical side of micro-budget movie making, scouting out bookstores, combing magazine racks, and most of all scouring the Internet for the latest information on digital video.  I took in a bewildering variety of facts and figures, tried to make out a pattern, then immediately took in more.  Whereupon a plan finally began to take shape. 

And so, on the first Friday of March, I revealed the initial details of my plan to a few people I knew.  Though I suspect my audience was somewhat underwhelmed... 
  
June 5, 1998 

Around the middle of May a friend kindly loaned me a video camera, a little VHS-C camcorder.  It was a basic point and shoot machine, one of those on which every control is  helpfully automatic, whether you want to be "helped" or not (a feature he claimed was for the benefit of his wife...) 

Nevertheless, I was fascinated by the thing.  Because oddly enough, in spite of all my recent interest in DV video, I had never operated a video camera before! 

I decided to see what I could do with the camera, and ended up making a short science fiction piece of a few minutes in length.  I actually shot it out of sequence and put the scenes together in editing - even though I really didn't have any editing equipment, aside from the "pause" button on a VCR!  I also didn't spend any money on the production, except for three VHS-C tapes; all the props and "special effects" were created from stuff I already had around the house. 

The result was certainly not of high technical quality, to say the least.  But I learned something about the fundamentals of movie making, even on such an elementary project - there is truly no teacher like experience.  Furthermore, when all was said and done, the piece actually told its story ... and to tell you the truth, I have never grown tired of watching it, faults and all.  (Chalk another one up for narcissism!) 

So it all turned out to be a very encouraging experience - something I definitely wanted to do again, in the not too distant future.  Though for my next try, I was also determined to have a much higher quality of equipment; to make better preparations for the production; and hopefully, to have made some advances in my own movie making skill.  In fact, I had already written a short script (finished on May 1) for the next project I had in mind - my first "serious" attempt at production.  Which was to be a little thing called Plastic Sides... 
 
To be continued... 
 

Meanwhile, here are some details on future projects.